We have been having a lot of fun the past few weekends. They have been wonderful occasions to unwind after busy school weeks. One day trip that we went on was to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

The boys were all smiles.

Don’t let the photo of the boys above fool you. Stephanie might be the biggest baseball fan in the family.

Grandma and Grandpa met us there too. Somehow, we neglected to get a picture of Susan and Dave who also joined us at the hall.

One could spend days at the Hall of Fame just going through the displays containing memories and stories of great yankee legends. There was some memorabilia from other teams as well. It was a great day.

Steve and the boys have also taken the opportunity to do a little fishing around the region in recent weeks.

Here is Sean on the shore of Cayuga Lake. The most recent header for our blog shows Nate on the pier of Seneca Lake.

Nate landed this nice largemouth bass.

At Cayuga Lake Sean landed this beauty!

Sean was gracious enough to let Steve hold his bass so that he would know what it is like to hold such a big fish.

You may or may not remember seeing Sean in a previous post when he prepared the soil for his pototoes in the spring. As it turns out this was the fruits of one of his three potato plants that he started. It’s not surprising that he has a green thumb when it comes to growing potatoes. He has the Irish genes, the Irish name, and an insatiable appetite for potatoes.

Well, to wrap up our Labor Day weekend with one more day of family fun, we decided to make it to one more nature trail that we heard about in the Syracuse vicinity. When we started getting closer to the trail, we could not believe the amount of traffic on the roads and the number of people who were out and about. They seemed to be expecting a crowd though, as getting parked seemed to go really smoothly. There seemed to be some sort of festival going on around the park.

We were really glad to see the trail head sign once we got there.

Sean and Nathan lead the way.

“Hey! Lavender!”

After the short but vigorous walk around the trail we decided to forego the trail mix and took advantage of the Doug’s Fish Fry booth that happened to be sitting at the trails end.

As we made our way back to the car, we stumbled across some sort of opening ceremony for an establishment called the Shamrock Bar. We had the feeling as if we might be related to half the people standing around there but we didn’t stand around long enough to find out. We wanted to beat the rush as it looked as if they were all about to storm the bar.

At this point we just decided that we might just as well enjoy the festival since we were here. “If you can’t beat ‘um, join ‘um.” Above we got an eagle-eye view of the nature trail from a ferris wheel that had been conveniently assembled for the festivities.

As we continued to make our way back to our car we came upon some sort of presentation that had drawn quite a crowd. Asking around, a performance by an artist named Drake Bell was just about to begin. As it turns out he is a character from a popular TV show called Drake and Josh on the Disney Channel that Sean and Nathan just love.

Judging by the piercing screams of all of the teenaged girls surrounding the stage, he put on a good show.

We had the chance to take the canoe out for the afternoon this past Sunday. You may recognize the canoe in the banner as being the family canoe that use to reside at the camp in Old Forge. The canoe now belongs to Dale, but we are canoe sitting until they can get it to Tennessee. Until then, we thought we would take advantage of having it in our possession. We found a little lake in the Southern Finger Lakes in a paddle guide that sounded like a perfect outing. It was called Lamoka Lake.

Once we got out on the water there was an Island calling to be explored.

A quick internet search indicated that there were suppose to be some pretty big bass in the lake but we didn’t have much luck finding any of them.

Sean had taken the opportunity to throw out a line while we were beached on the island.

Nathan took the opportunity to go for a little swim and to skip some rocks.

It was a wonderful day to be out on the water. We also felt more confident about putting a canoe on our car a setting out for a day trip from home such as this. We can see ourselves doing this more often in the years to come.